Leap Years

So every four years we add one day to the month of February making it 29 instead of 28 days... The reason: The actual year is one quarter of a day longer than our time-recorded year..

The question here is, since our current arrangement (adding one day every 4 years) seems a bit un-elegant and messy, wouldn't it have been much better if we had extended the second by the equivalent of a quarter of a day spread out...

To explain: Let's say that our current measure of a second is x  ( x is the length of one second ) ; if we used instead another value x' ; such that our time-recorded year would be equal to actual year ; then we wouldn't need to add one day every 4 years .... x' would be calculated as:

x' * 60 * 24 * 365 ( number of new seconds in an actual year assumed 365 days) = x * 60 * 24 * 365 (number of old seconds in a 365-day year) + x * 60 * 24 * 1 / 4 (extra seconds we are adding with the 1-day per 4 years) ... calculating for x' :

x' = x * ( 60*24 * 365.25  ) / ( 60 *24 * 365 ) and x' = x * (365.25/365) ..... If we changed our measure of seconds to this new value, we wouldn't need leap years


* The problem remaining is to find an objective measure of a second that allows for its calculation as a rational number ( I guess that would facilitate things ) ... so if a second is defined as: since 1967 the second has been defined as the duration of 9,192,631,770periods of the radiation corresponding to the transition between the two hyperfine levels of the ground state of the caesium 133 atom ; Then the new second would be similarly defined by the equivalent of 9198928093.1301369863013698630137 such periods ... of course another element whose period can be expressed as a multiple of 365 would help here

The Big Questions in life

Asking "Why" has many levels, the most shallow of which is when the 'Why' is interpreted as a 'How' as in "Why were you late? -Because I missed the Bus", and the deepest of which touches the real intent ( - Because I didn't really want to see you ) ..

The big WHY questions (WHY life? WHY the universe?) as a matter of elementary philosophical distinction can't be answered by scientists looking at the 'How'..

"The Scientists who don't grasp this distinction, however brilliant they are as scientists, are philosophical morons"

"Today we are encouraged to put aside the big questions of life and death. Why are we here? What is the meaning of life? such questions are strictly meaningless, we are told. Just get on with it. And so we lose some of the sense of how strange it is to be alive."

On the Leadership-Management in Politics discussion

In Politics, a decade is an eternity

- M. Porter in his article " The Competitive Advantage of Nations "

Can - and Should - Leadership and Management of Nations combined into one function ? should our politicians be our 'leaders' ??? Aren't the two roles (politician & leader) inherently opposed to each other, and how to expect a regular politician who gains a strictly time-limited position by spending all his time doing the 'small stuff' and managing appearances or by rising through another irrelevant ladder to be able to provide sustainable vision and thought leadership ... ? Assuming that vision and thought leadership are important components of building a better future - the stuff of leadership.

Voting in the United Nations

As much as the voting system in the security sounds unfair (with the - relatively - arbitrary VETO rights), the voting in the general assembly (as inconsequential and spectacle-only as it is) seems funnier to me ... the One-Man One-Vote when applied to countries becomes utterly ridiculous: How can a country with 1Billion+ people have the same voting power as a country of 100Thousand- people ?? Why should this country of 100K people have the same saying about the planet's future ?

The one-man-one-vote when applied to countries becomes the some-people-are-more-equal-than-others vote!

By the way, How on earth are these countries made in the first place !! some are based on ethnicity, but many don't have their own countries .. some are based on historic coincidence, and some are based on funny deals !!!

State Capitalism - Really ?

I was reading a complete file in the Economist last month that talks about 'State Capitalism'; and discusses in detail the advantages and flaws of the model; of course considering China / Russia / Brazil (in that order) as heroes of the model.

Of course China is engaged in State Capitalism; and many of its leading firms are owned by the state and that is clear in their ownership.. Similar for other countries in this 'axis of state-capitalism' .... Now the really interesting question - if we ponder the claims a bit - is: is liberal capitalism really liberal capitalism. Let's look at some of the evidence:
 - South Korea: the country's leading non-state firms (Samsung, LG, Hyundai, etc....) receive unlimited support from the state financially (even direct contribution to marketing spending) as well as in positioning in key negotiations with other countries... No one can argue that without the state's role in selecting and promoting these firms they would have survived and grown to their current size.
 - The United States: The large defense budgets, the support to Boeing, the contracts that get awarded hazily, as well as many many deals between firms and other countries that are brokered by the state
 - Why does the french president british/ turkish prime minister for example travel with an army of business men and heads of economic sectors and 'close deals' as they are on diplomatic trips ..
 - What about the huge amounts of money that can (and have been) be thrown at companies considered 'too big to fail' .... Isn't the state already effectively a stakeholder here? 

In the end ... the state in most/all these 'liberal-capitalism' countries is the first supporter of its business elite, and this begins to clarify things: The State is the support for the country's business elite and key companies in all cases of US / UK / France / China / Russia / etc ... ( granted with varying degrees) .. The only difference between them, is that - Ironically - in the Chinese case, it is more transparent as we know who the owner is of these companies (the state) and we know that he is acting in his own self interest ... with the other countries, everything becomes under the table !